Introduction

What is an avant-garde? In posing such a question, this issue of New Literary History seeks to reexamine a category that often seems all too self-evident. Our aim is not to draw up a fresh list of definitions, specifications, and prescriptions but to explore the conditions and repercussions of the question itself. In the spirit of analogously titled queries—from Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” to Foucault’s “What is an Author?”—we hope to spur reflection not only on a particular object of study but also on the frameworks and critical faculties that we bring to bear on it. As Paul Mann notes, every critical text on the avant-garde, whether tacitly or overtly, “has a stake in the avant-garde, in its force or destruction, in its survival or death (or both).”¹ A reassessment of these stakes is one of the priorities of this special issue.

Narratives of the avant-garde abound. Whether they come to bury the avant-garde or to praise it, these narratives are typically organized around moments of shock, rupture, and youthful revolt that speak to certain beliefs about the functions of experimental art and the nature of historical change. In his 1968 Theory of the Avant-Garde, for instance, Renato Poggioli describes two major phases in the development of the avant-garde. The first stage is anchored in the leftist politics of the 1840s and the 1870s, where the notion of an advanced guard serves to authorize the political agitations and underground activities that helped trigger the revolutionary events of 1848 and the Paris Commune. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the mantle of the avant-garde is transferred from politics to aesthetics, as manifested in the new stridency and shock value claimed by art and the self-consciously vanguardist ethos of such movements as Dada, futurism, surrealism, and constructivism. For Poggioli, however, such aesthetic appropriations of the insurrectionary energies of political vanguardism remained largely metaphorical and risked bad faith in exaggerating the circumscribed effects of artistic innovation and intervention.²

This narrative has been widely adopted and adapted in the four decades since its publication, and its insistence on the historical priority of a strictly political—and leftist—incarnation of the avant-garde remains influential. From Poggioli’s vantage point in 1968, the meaning of past avant-gardes reflected the urgency of contemporary concerns: to what extent could the history of avant-gardes and their oscillation between political and aesthetic goals shed light on the utopian ambitions of the New Left? In our own moment, we may be struck by the fact that this narrative of stages—the “political” moment of the 1840s and 1870s, the “aesthetic” moment of the 1920s, and the “theoretical” moment of the 1960s—persists in imputing a single, overriding agency and intention to avant-garde activity, in spite of the historical differences it acknowledges. Such a narrative tends, in short, to measure the successes of avant-garde activity—and above all, its failures—against a singular criterion of revolutionary political transformation.

The meanings and consequences of avant-gardes, however, cannot be deduced from the metaphorical resonance of the term itself. Indeed, the militarist aggression and forward movement implicit in the idea of the avant-garde have been questioned almost as frequently as they have been heeded; the amplitude of radical artistic and political practices constitutes a multifaceted history of such renegotiations. And whether the avant-garde represents a discrete moment or series of moments in the intellectual history of modernity or a more diffuse aesthetic or political ethos, its currency resides as much in the history of grappling with its valences as in the diverse works and movements collected under its name. This special issue proposes, then, that the question “what is an avant-garde?” remains a productive site for methodological and historical invention, and not merely a monument to the glorious past of radical art.

For the past few decades, the study of the avant-garde has persistently circled around the question of its death. The parameters for such claims were largely set by Peter Bürger’s obituary to...